


Once upon a Time in Belgium

by AlwaysawaywiththeFairies



Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Awkward First Times, F/M, Post-Endgame, Secret Relationship, Sneaking Around, Steggy - Freeform, Touching, Wartime, petting, religion sort of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-29
Updated: 2020-04-08
Packaged: 2021-01-08 07:18:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,663
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21231923
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AlwaysawaywiththeFairies/pseuds/AlwaysawaywiththeFairies
Summary: Steve and Peggy had a jolly good time in Belgium back in the day.You are going to have to help this Protestant woman, Steven, because we are two sacraments into this conversation and I still do not have a clue of why Barnes and you have not been in speaking terms for the record time of two hours. Do elaborate.... or why Steve will not go to mass and Bucky won't stop teasing him about his reasons.





	1. Chapter 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> You are going to have to help this Protestant woman, Steven, because we are two sacraments into this conversation and I still do not have a clue of why Barnes and you have not been in speaking terms for the record time of two hours. Do elaborate. 
> 
> ... or why Steve will not go to mass and Bucky won't stop teasing him about his reasons.

Peggy finds it endearing, really, the banter between Steve and Barnes. There is no ill will behind, no danger of it somehow ending up in a fight, it makes for entertainment in long days marching in the middle of nowhere, and it occasionally gives her a glimpse of what Steve was like as a child. Barnes has managed to touch a nerve today, though, insisting, to Steve’s strong refusal, on making the most of having a small Catholic church nearby and going to mass tomorrow morning, as they won’t be meeting the British soldiers they will be teaming up with for a mission till the evening. Steve wouldn’t be the first soldier losing his faith in the war, Peggy considers, but it strikes her as odd. The rest of the commandos accompanied them to a Catholic mass in Poland just a few months ago in a similar situation and, as far as she knows, Steve has never mentioned having doubts or questioning his faith. Not to her, at least.

She finds him alone, sitting by a tree, notebook and pen in hand and not a line drawn in the five minutes she observes without him noticing.

\- _May I? _

He nods, the beginning of a little smile on his face, and she sits close enough to risk a bit of hooting and teasing if any of the commandos wanders their way.

\- _I wouldn’t mind going with you, like in Poland. If it helps with whatever the trouble is. _

Steve looks back to his notebook again, as if not having heard her, and starts a sketch of the countryside around them. After a minute or two, when Peggy is starting to consider whether she has imagined her own words, he bites his lower lip and offers an answer.

-_ I can’t take the Holy Communion. _

Peggy’s face must show her confusion, as he soon adds

\- _I would have to go to confession before, you know. _

\- _Oh… Oh_. She had a pretty good idea of what that confession would involve and why it was a question that bothered him now and not back in Poland. _Then it would probably be best for me not to go. _

\- _The thing is_, he says awkwardly, _I can’t. You can only go to confession if you truly repent, and you intend for it to never happen again, and I… _

She cuts him, quite sure by that point in the conversation her cheeks must match the blush in his.

\- _So you do not want to go to mass with Barnes because he will take Holy Communion and you can’t and you think he will think less of you because of that?_, she suggests.

\- _Bucky hasn’t taken the Holy Communion since he was 16! _

\- _You are going to have to help this Protestant woman, Steven, because we are two sacraments into this conversation and I still do not have a clue of why Barnes and you have not been in speaking terms for the record time of two hours. Do elaborate_.

Steve makes a face that could only be described as embarrassed sulking, and Peggy has to fight the urge to be very unprofessional right then and there.

\- _He will assume that we’re having sex. I… I used to be an altar boy when we were teenagers and I might have been a bit… preachy at the time. Goody-two-shoes. Could’ve been described as annoying by some. Bucky being one of them. He will assume we’re having sex and I’ll never hear the end of that. _

She is the one starting the laughs, and, mad as he was just a few minutes before, he can’t help laughing a bit himself. When the moment’s passed, Peggy looks over her shoulder to check if the coast is clear, looks him in the eye and whispers:

-_ It’s not… not sex._ She raises an eyebrow. _Or how do you call in Brooklyn what happened in Belgium? Fondueing? _

Steve is leaning into her half a second later, nose nuzzling her neck, and she can hear the cheeky smile in his voice:

\- _I call it fooling around. I call it being together. I call it it’s nobody’s business what you and I do when we’re alone, not even Bucky’s. _

He’s so close, and it’s almost two weeks in the field without a single moment for privacy, not a peck in the lips, not even a hug or a touch of hands, and she is beginning to feel that she is either about to melt or to add up to Steve’s pile of things to confess when Barnes coughs up to get their attention. Peggy stands up gracefully and mumbles about something she needs to tell Morita while walking away from them.

\- _Buddy, I wanted to say I’m sorry. _

Steve stares at him. Just like that? It doesn’t sound much like his friend.

\- _I’m sorry you’re mad because you’re a bit of a hypocrite and you won’t admit it_, Bucky teases, grinning like the cat that got the cream.

\- _Buck, I don’t… _

\- _I know_, he sighs, _you don’t kiss and tell. It’s just… it’s weird, you know, you running around having secrets with somebody else. Good thing I did share with you all my wisdom about how to treat a lady so that you won’t mess up with Carter_, he jokes.

\- _I’ll tell you a secret Peg and I have. Just the one_, he mentions, while working on his drawing. _She liked me before. Before the serum, I mean. Not as a friend, not as a person._ He furrows his brows _Well, YES as a person, obviously, but not only. She was attracted to me when I was short, and skinny. She’s told me, but also I know it sounds ridiculous, but I kind of could feel it at the time. _

\- _It’s not ridiculous, a woman liking you the way you looked before, for the love of god, Steve. It’s true you didn’t use to have hundreds of girls swooning at the sight of you like you do now, but it’s not as if you tried. Carter is definitely something, though. I’m glad it’s her. I’m only sorry you two have to hide like you’re going something bad. You should be parading her around Coney Island, French kissing in the Wonder Wheel, and holding on to each other in the Cyclone and eating hot dogs afterwards. I hate that you don’t have that. I wanted you to have that. _

\- _Oh, we’ll have that, Buck. I’ll even let you tag along. Good thing I can share with you all my wisdom about how to be the third wheel in dates all over Brooklyn_, Steve laughs.

\- _About, well, you know…. I just wanted you to know it’s not bad. You are not bad if it’s happened, or if you want it to happen. You’re normal. You’re human. It’s just my opinion, alright, and I admit it contradicts Father Kennedy’s, but Father Kennedy also told us that masturbation could lead to blindness when we were like fourteen and my eyesight is still as good as ever. So thank you very much, but I’ll stick to his opinion on strictly spiritual matters and to mine on the rest. I suggest you do the same._


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Peggy and Steve. Post-Endgame chat. On the kitchen floor. Because of reasons.

_We need to stop doing this_, Peggy sighed.

_Why?_ Steve said, hugging her closer to him.

_Because it’s 11.30 am on a Saturday and we’re half naked on the kitchen floor, with most of our grocery shopping still in the bags, and I have absolutely no idea where my knickers are._

Steve chuckled.

_I’ll stack up everything nicely. I’ll help you find your knickers. And… love?_

_Hm?_

_I’m really sorry we are only half naked. We definitely should be completely naked. C’mon, we’ve been married for two months, I’m pretty sure most newlyweds are going at it all of the time._

Peggy hit his arm jokingly.

_You have no shame, Steve Rogers. And I’m quite sure most newlyweds are not in our situation._

Steve had the decency to look a bit sheepish at her words, an expression that, in Peggy’s opinion, made him look even more delicious than usual.

_Not that it is entirely your fault_, she conceded.

It had been a sort of present from heaven, having Steve back in her life, recovering the future she had imaged for herself back during the war and grieved for later. She had been afraid – both of them had, actually – she would find him a different man, after all he had been through. It was a relief that it was still him in almost every single way.

She was perfectly fine with him ruining – sorry, spoiling – films 30 years into the future. She would not remember the lines anyway and frankly, it can’t be all that important who the father of that Luke is. “I wish I could google that” was a sentence that amused her to no end, together with the frustration in his face every time he uttered it. She was quite alright with Steve randomly staring into space and muttering to himself how much he missed Indian food.

Those things, she had grown accustomed to. Steve’s newly-found candid approach to talking about intimacy, however, was an entirely different question. He had always been, well, rather responsive towards her advances and passionate, too, but he would follow her lead rather than lead himself. And yet, this version of Steve would stand next to her in the queue at the supermarket and whisper in her ear how he couldn’t wait to get home and go on his knees to give her ‘a real good time.’ She understood people in the 21st century were less reluctant to talk plainly about sex, but surely an offer of cunnilingus to your wife in the middle of a public place was too much even for them.

_Is everyone in the future so very direct when talking about private matters?_, she joked.

_You wouldn’t believe the things people in the future say. And do. And film._

Peggy lifted herself on her elbow to look him straight in the eye and check if he was telling the truth, or just teasing her. Difficult to tell. There is a shift in his expression then.

_Does it bother you, though?_

_It doesn’t, darling. It’s simply… different._

_All those years, Peggy, I tried, I really tried to find someone. I couldn’t. There was nobody I could love the way I loved you._

_Darling…_ she breathed, hands caressing his face.

_And kind of in the same way, I wasn’t a monk, Peg…_

_Careful_, she raised an eyebrow, _you don’t want to book a night at the sofa, Rogers._

_No… let me. I wasn’t a monk, but I thought that my body, serum or not, was old, and my soul was old, and that there were things I just could not feel again with the same intensity as I did before. And then I saw you again and I… I…_

Peggy let him take a breath and felt his loving hands, the ones she once thought lost forever, roaming around her stomach, her back, her neck, her face… It’s almost a secret when the question leaves his mouth in a whisper:

_Do you remember Belgium?_

_How could I not?_

_With all due respect as your husband, I have to say I had never in my life been as horny as that._

_With all due respect as your wife_, Peggy winked at him, _I recall both of us being terribly hot and bothered._

_But I was 25 and in love for the first time and it was easier for me to think, after waking up from the ice, that it felt the way it felt because of that and it could never be the same as an old man. And then I saw you, and I felt 25 again. I might be a senior citizen, but I swear I feel 25 every day and every time with you. And I suspect I might keep feeling 25 around you until both of us are senior citizens._

Peggy wrapped her arms around her husband, trying for him not to see the tears pooling in her eyes. It had been a terribly long time without him for her, and she could not begin to understand how it had felt for him, waking up to a world so different to the only one he had ever known.

Back in the war, he had buried his face in her neck sometimes after days in which he had found himself particularly overwhelmed by his recently enhanced senses. It happened every now and again, after coming back to her, for different reasons. The anniversary of Tony’s death. Whenever Bucky had had a bad day at the hospital where he was recovering. On Natasha’s birthday. He would always emerge from her embrace saying she was his shelter, and she found it a relief that they had found each other again, after all that pain.

He started fretting after a few minutes.

_I was thinking next time you write to your mother, we should prepare her to meet Bucky. I’m hoping when the time comes, he’ll be feeling much better, but he still finds it difficult to spend time with people he doesn’t know._

_Oh, darling, _Peggy caressed his face_, my mother will be travelling for the baptism of an American grandchild born six months and a half after a Catholic wedding in Brooklyn. Believe me if I tell you, as godparents go, Bucky will not be the difficult one._


	3. Chapter 3 - in Belgium

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What happened in Belgium - “What, darling? I want to see you too.”

Steve was fine with kissing. Not just fine: delighted. The thing is, when you have the benefit of moderate privacy in a forgotten closet, storage room or a dark corner in a basement (and one of the perks of your girl being a spy is that she can and will find every single one of them), kissing tends to lead to embracing, which in turn had led to Peggy’s hands under his shirt in a particularly hot spring night a couple of weeks before. Which had eventually led them to what he had defined – to Peggy’s great amusement – as the boxing approach: anything happening above waist level was fair play as long as they were both enthusiastic participants. 

  
No eyebrows were raised when Steve announced his intention to explore the old library in the basement after Peggy had retired upstairs to the bedroom she had claimed as hers for the night. The guys were mostly content and distracted, halfway through a game of poker. It was their first night sleeping inside after a few days on the move and in a recently abandoned boarding school, no less. Compared to most of the places where they had laid their sleeping bags since the war had started, it was practically a palace. Besides, it was hardly breaking news, Steve wanting to check out any library they came across. 

\- “_You’re late_”, he hears when he sets foot in the library.

  
\- “_The path must be a bit less tricky when all you have to do is sneak through the passage that goes straight from the principal’s room to the library, I guess. Some of us had to convince a very drunk Gabe to stay on the ground floor, you know?_”

  
He gets for an answer what feels like all the kisses they haven’t been able to give each other these last few days, and then some. 

  
\- “_You’re looking all pretty today_”, he breathes against her neck.

  
\- “_Steve Rogers! You’ve seen me in my Sunday best and it is today, of all days, that you decide to compliment my looks? When I’m in my oldest uniform, I can’t for my life find my rouge and I’ve had my hair braided by Bucky ‘I’ve never not braided a lady’s hair after having contributed to ruining it’ Barnes?_”

  
Steve chuckles. _“To be fair, your hands were full of mud.”_

\- “_And it’s a rather decent attempt. Don’t tell him, or I’ll never hear the end of that_”, she warns.

  
\- “_Mary_”, Steve says, a twinkle in his eye. Peggy raises an eyebrow.

  
\- “_Bucky’s sister. She was born when we were ten or so. Mrs. Barnes worked a lot when she was little, so Bucky was in charge of caring for her. Taking her to school, making sure she ate something for breakfast…_”

  
\- “_Braiding her hair?_” Peggy smiled.

  
\- “_Yes. I guess not as exciting for the guys as his version of why he knows his way around a braid. Don’t tell him I told you, or I’ll be the one in trouble._”

Peggy smiles that adorable smile of hers that she rarely shares with people outside her inner circle and he’s practically on top of her, open-mouthed and eager, before he himself realizes. It is quite the heated kissing session for a good few minutes, with Peggy’s hands drawing circles on his chest and back that are driving him crazy, and Steve cupping her breasts and trying to convince himself it really is not that bad if it’s your girlfriend, and you’re in love, and you are doing nothing else of all the things you’re not supposed to do, and you really, REALLY plan on getting married. He’s got himself half convinced by the time Peggy covers his right hand with hers and mumbles: “_Under?_” and makes her meaning clear when she sees the confusion on his face “_would you touch me like that under my blouse?_”

He must’ve stared at her like a complete and utter idiot, because Peggy suddenly looks downcast and terribly, terribly embarrassed. He curses himself and follows Bucky’s advice: “_when you’ve fucked up, which you will do, like every other guy, you just kiss her, and say you’re sorry, and that you love her, and then kiss her some more._”   
Bucky didn’t exactly use to brag about his sexual advances with girls when they were younger, but for some reason he had deemed himself responsible for guiding Steve and giving him advice. As if, to Steve’s astonishment, he thought there was a chance an adolescent Steve was about to get a girlfriend any minute and it was just urgent for him to know about the basics.   
Because of the way he was brought up and his lack of experience, that’s pretty much all he’s got: advice from 16-year-old Bucky, a few things he’s read about in books, and what he hears from the guys. And that’s how, a month shy of 25, he often finds himself looking back to the words of guidance of a teenager. 

His fingers tremble as he undoes the buttons on her blouse, and he doesn’t feel half as clumsy as he should because of how she’s softly caressing his hair and looking at him in a way that makes him want to stay in that library for the rest of his life. She turns around to fold it, so that it won’t crease, and Steve wonders briefly if he would have been able, before the serum, to tell the slight difference between the shades of cream of the slip Peggy is wearing and the strip of her brassiere. She throws an inviting glance over her shoulder, together with a: “_please, remind me where we were, soldier_”, and it is on again.   
It’s not like he can really think straight, but there are a couple of thoughts that keep coming to his mind. The first one is how it is possible that, of all the stuff he’s heard guys talking about throughout all these years, nobody has ever mentioned how incredibly soft women are. The second one is… well, he needs another good look. He doesn’t want to stare at her in a way that makes her feel uncomfortable, but he has a half a notion that Peggy tonight, all breathless, with her rosy cheeks and her messy braid, is the most beautiful woman he’s ever seen in his life, and he NEEDS a proper look. Meanwhile, he keeps stealing glances while kissing her neck. Steve is not quite sure if it’s something he’s heard women like, or he simply acts out of instinct, but his lips go from neck to collarbone, and then lower, and he probably would have been too shy to continue had Peggy not whimpered all the way till his mouth made it to the edge of the fabric.   
She pushes his chest softly, and Steve is red as a beetroot and starting to apologize when he sees she is pulling the strips of her slip down, so that she is bare from waist up, apart from her brassiere. He gets his proper look then and there, and decides at some point he is going to need to stop rejecting Bucky’s attempts to give him a few rubbers to have ‘just in case’ because he’s not going to make it to the end of the war a virgin.   
He feels her tug at his undershirt. “_Off with that._”  
He throws her a questioning look, which she answers with a naughty smile.

  
\- “_What, darling? I want to see you too._”

  
There’s more skin to explore, to caress and to kiss, and Steve is very sorry this is not allowed, and considered sinful and dirty, but he’s not sorry at all that he is doing it, and he sure doesn’t feel that he is a worse person now that he is licking Peggy’s nipple through the fabric of her underwear than he did when they started seeing each other, and were just kissing, hands not moving an inch from her waist. 

  
He has Peggy pulled flushed against him, nuzzling his neck, when she addresses the obvious.  
\- “_Darling?_”, she bites her lip.

  
Steve hums something that sounds like a ‘_yes?_’

  
\- “_You can’t walk back upstairs like this_”, she whispers, after a quick glance at his trousers.

  
It was one thing trusting the commandos to be too distracted playing poker to think too much about what Steve had been doing for the better part of an hour in a library where most of the books must have been in French, but to try to walk back upstairs sporting an erection? It was social suicide. As a group, they had somehow developed a sort of sixth sense that let them know when something embarrassing had happened to any of them, and they would not let go for days. It could be weeks of endless teasing if there was nothing better coming up. Steve doubted they could ever find anything more embarrassing to laugh at than their captain going to bed trying to cover a hard-on with a battered translation to French of _Little Women_. 

He felt Peggy’s hand sliding between his pants and his underwear, caressing his lower stomach. 

  
\- “_I have a vague idea of how to help you with that. Unfortunately, it would be non-compliant with the boxing approach, and we wouldn’t want that… or would we?_” she asks, with those incredibly big eyes, filled with so much passion and love he is finding it difficult to breathe. Or to say anything coherent, for that matter.

  
\- “_You don’t have to…_”, he offers.

  
\- “_I want to… if you want to_”, she says, and that closes the deal.

  
He kisses her during the whole thing, which admittedly doesn't take very long. He’s hardly an expert in sexual matters, but he has masturbated enough to know as much. It feels different, softer, and loving and just plain better, and he kicks himself in his mind for all the times he’s heard guys saying they miss this and he couldn’t understand why they would miss something they could easily do to themselves. 

He’s a bit overwhelmed at first, not only by the physical sensation in itself- he had felt every single thing more intensely since he had been injected the serum- but also by how Peggy made him feel. She embraces him, his head buried in her neck, and as he feels his heart rate going back to normal, he tries to remember what he knows.   
“_When a girl touches you, you make sure you return the favor, and you make sure that you do it right, and that she knows that you like doing it, and she’s going to want no other guy like she wants you, alright?_”, Bucky had once said. Steve particularly remembered that ‘lesson’ because, out of curiosity, he had asked how on earth he was going to make sure to do it right if he had never done it before, which had ended up with Bucky doing a drawing to indicate what, when, and how. Steve had spent weeks switching it from one hiding place to another in his small room, terrified of his mam finding it and thinking he needed confession immediately. He could have thrown it away, but it was one thing to know that he wasn’t going to have a girlfriend anytime soon, and a completely different one to assume he wasn’t going to find that information useful at some point in the future. 

\- “_I’ve never done his before_”, he whispers in Peggy’s ear, hand up her skirt. “_But I would like to, would you like me to?_”

  
She nods, and spreads her legs slightly, to allow him better access. When he feels the wetness through her panties, she presses herself against his hand and moans a ‘_please, Steve_’ that makes him weak in the knees. It takes him longer to make her finish, but he takes a mental note of every touch that makes her hips move on their own accord, and every movement that had ended with her arching her back in pleasure, and every soft moan. 

They compose themselves a bit more timid than they usually are in the presence of each other. Steve sighs when she looks ready to leave and Peggy gives him a short peck on the lips.

  
\- “_Count five minutes for me to go all the way up and then you may go to the ground floor. Tell them you’re going to sleep, and stop and knock on my door to say goodnight. It would look suspicious if you didn’t bid me goodnight_.”

Steve nods and does as told. Bucky stands up when he announces he’s going to try and sleep a bit, grabs his shoulder, and says: _“me too, buddy. I’m tired of beating this hopeless lot_”, and goes upstairs with him. He waits a few steps away from them, smirk on his face, as Steve knocks on Peggy’s door and awkwardly wishes her a good night. 

  
\- “_You enjoyed reading in French, soldier_?”, she asks, mischievous eyes on Steve, pointing at the book in his hands.

  
\- “_I’m still learning, ma’am, but I reckon with practice I could do a lot better_.”

* * *

Steve is trying to spread his sleeping bag on the most decent bunk he can find when Bucky starts speaking.

  
\- “_She’s good. I’m not saying she’s bad. I mean, look at what she has to work with_”, he says, pointing at Steve, “_you’re the worst fucking liar in Brooklyn. And she’s a spy, Stevie, you have to hand it to her, whatever thing she did to make it seem like there was nothing going on, she did it well. I’m not saying it’s her fault, it’s just not in your nature to do these things right_.”

  
\- “_I don’t know what you mean_”, Steve replies, busying himself with the stuff in his backpack. 

  
\- “_I mean you’re as subtle as a steamroller. I mean you can say a few sentences in French at best, and definitely not read it. And I mean, Steve_”, he walks right next to him, sniffing “_you smell so nice and ladylike right now that I feel like I should buy you flowers_.” 

  
\- “_Buck…_”

  
\- “_I know… Just have a shower before Dum Dum gets any closer to you, buddy, or you two will be hearing about tonight for a few weeks_,” Bucky warns. “_and make it a cold one!_”

  
He lets out a laugh as he hears Steve swearing under his breath in the showers next door. 

**Author's Note:**

> It's my first Steggy fic in AO3. Please, be kind.


End file.
